I heard some talking-heads blather about the release of incoming President Donald Trump’s new official portrait on Fox, CNN and MSNBC, and quickly decided it was not worth my time. Then I looked at the thing and decided it was worth a little bit of my time after all.
It is a remarkable choice by Trump, since he obviously approved it, something we cannot say with certainly about the current President’s portrait, or anything he did or said, amazingly. On the Trump-Hating news outlets, they have been saying that it bears an uncanny resemblance to his immortal mug shot…
…which is only true in the sense that he isn’t smiling in either of them and both are images of Donald Trump.
Well, today has started like so many other mornings lately: by me being kicked out of bed by my dog. (We’re going to have to talk about this.) Then, like so many Fridays, I find myself thinking about how the entire weekend is going to be devoted to work and depressing chores, causing me to feel like I owe myself a tiny break today, but I won’t really take one, just slack off enough to make me feel lazy and irresponsible.
Then I visited my email, and told a website optimizer who claimed EA had “no web presence at all” to bite me. I wish it had more “presence” just as I wish I could figure out a way to make some money for the work I do here about four hours a day without minimizing readership, but I can’t, and that’s that. I didn’t start Ethics Alarms for profit, and I won’t run it that way.
Finally, as I stare at another blank “Add New Post” page, I find myself getting all warm, fuzzy, teary and grateful over the outpouring of appreciation and kindness I have received over the past horrible year from so many of you out there. I wish I were organized enough to write individual notes, but I’m not…that kind of thing was among Grace’s jobs, because I’m too scattered and easily distracted to do it competently.
This was especially true during the holidays. I got cards with messages that made me cry, gift cards, and checks: one of you even stopped by the house to deliver a gift (and give me some much needed human company and live face-to-face conversation.) I received almost as many seasonal greeting from the readers here as I did from people around the country I have actually met—hmmmmm, maybe that should tell me something.
It all meant a great deal to me, and does, and will. Thank you for reading, thank you for caring, and thank you for giving me something to look forward to during each and every day, especially during a year during which most days began with me hoping that everything was just a bad dream, and that I would find Grace in the shower, like Bobby Ewing at the end of that infamous fake season on “Dallas.”
Well enough mushy stuff: get to work. You have some brilliant comments to write, and I have to go argue with a pit bull….
I was going to shut down EA for the day since the previous post was both depressing and exhausting, then I stumbled across this to which, as Mrs. Loman says at the end of “Death of a Salesman,” “Attention should be paid.”
A national security expert was prepared to brief reporters on the breaking news of a tentative Israel-Hamas cease-fire yesterday, but Biden Paid Liar Karine Jean-Pierre refused to allow him to take the mic, forcing reporters and the nation to wait an extra hour before hearing the details of the American hostages being released, including their names. National security adviser Jake Sullivan personally asked Jean-Pierre to permit his top spokesman, John Kirby, address reporters moments after Biden announced the deal. She refused because, insiders say, it was her final White House briefing and she regarded it as her “farewell party.”
A source in the White House told the New York Post, “She kinda marketed it as a celebration of her and her tenure and unfortunately that took precedence over huge breaking news — and we haven’t had this kind of news in this administration for a long time.”
I really don’t feel like going through this; it’s reminds me of that old gross-out camp song about “great green gobs of greasy grimy gopher guts, mutilated monkey meat” and “concentrated chicken feet.” It degrades the office. It degrades everyone who listened to it. It degrades me to have to describe it.
Over at PJ Media, Ed Morrisey had an equivalent reaction, calling it “the worst case of valedictory projection ever” and writing in part,
Beware the oligarchy, warned the president who … just gave George Soros a Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Beware the oligarchy, warned the president who … cajoled and pressured tech billionaires to comply with his attempts to censor speech and suppress dissent through his State Department’s Global Engagement Center.
But this offal from the Oval Ofiice demands a thorough fisking, much as I’d rather pound nails into my scrotum, so here we go. (The gift-linked Times transcript is here.)
During the debate over the House bill to stop males “transitioning” to glorious womanhood from injuring female athletes while cheating their way to taking their scholarships, records, championships and safety, two of the worst female members of Congress—and that’s quite an achievement, given the competition— showed (again) why the public no longer trusts its republic. The two women showed themselves to be ethics dunces, incompetent elected officials, disastrous role models and, to get technical about it, assholes.
We long ago reached the point where anyone paying attention swallowed comforting myth that any modern President delivers a farewell address that he really composed himself, but President Joe Biden’s scripted cavalcade of lies and hypocrisy is in a whole different category.
“He had the largest national debt of any president four-year period, number one. Number two, he got $2 trillion tax cut, benefited the very wealthy.What I’m going to do is fix the taxes. For example, we have a thousand trillionaires in America – I mean, billionaires in America. And what’s happening? They’re in a situation where they, in fact, pay 8.2 percent in taxes. If they just paid 24 percent or 25 percent, either one of those numbers, they’d raised $500 million – billion dollars, I should say, in a 10-year period. We’d be able to right – wipe out his debt. We’d be able to help make sure that – all those things we need to do, childcare, elder care, making sure that we continue to strengthen our healthcare system, making sure that we’re able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I’ve been able to do with the COVID – excuse me, with dealing with everything we have to do with. Look, if – we finally beat Medicare.”
….could compose, much less think, what he repeated off a teleprompter last night after resting all day.
Meanwhile, while Cuomo is spot-on, here’s a quote from alleged conservative intellectual David Brooks,who today leveled similar criticism, but discredited himself with this:
I can’t even tell if Brooks was being sarcastic; he has written so many outrageous things since his brain was surgically removed by the New York Times and replaced with a bag of Cheetohs. Sarcasm is not typically his metier. If Brooks was attempting sarcasm, he’s lousy at it: no columnist who wants to be taken seriously should ever, ever utter the words “Senator Mazie Hirono was excellent” in jest, irony, or God forbid, sincerity.
This made me laugh out loud, and I have to do a quick post. I heard successive guests and hosts on MSNBC desperately try to give puppet President Joe Biden credit for today’s cease fire and negotiated release of the Hamas hostages, including the Americans. They denied that Donald Trump had anything to do with it. Trump, you may recall, promised that “all Hell would break loose” if the hostages were not released by the time he became President. Inaugeration Day is January 20. The cease-fire deal goes into effect on January 19.
That’s just a coincidence, you see. Sure it is. “Elephant? What elephant?”
Would it really be so difficult for even the worst Trump-phobics to give him credit for what to any non-deranged observer is so clearly the result of his thinly-veiled threat and the belief abroad that, unlike some “red line”- drawing Presidents of the recent past, it is risky to call this one’s bluff?
Apparently it is too difficult. They would rather lie when the lie is obvious and indefensible than show the integrity to admit that the man they hate so much did something that worked. How unprofessional. How petty. How self-indicting. How stupid.
Sorry: This started out as a quiz, but changed my mind…
I was going to post another one of the despicable Democratic Senators’ grilling of Defense Secretary nominee Pete Hegseth as a genuine quiz with the question, “Was Sen. X’s questioning of Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee to be Secretary of Defense, competent, fair, respectful and professional?” but after viewing the disgusting performance of Hawaii’s Senator Hirono, easily the dumbest Senator in the chamber and maybe the dumbest U.S. Senator in history, I realized it would be an unethical exercise.
I only raise ethics quizzes when I have genuine doubts about the answer, even if I personally have come to a conclusion. But in the case of Hirono’s scummy excuse for legitimate vetting, there is no argument. She was unprofessional, rude, disrespectful, dishonest and hateful. She didn’t allow Hegseth a fair opportunity to respond to her varied slanders. Much of her questioning was of the “When did you stop beating your wife?” variety. It was redolent of the worst of the Kavenaugh hearings, and that’s about as bad as it gets. Unsourced anonymous allegations are technically known as “rumors,” and especially in today’s snake-pit version of Washington, D.C., they should be ignored: to Hirono—wow, she’s an idiot—they qualify as evidence.
In 2018, I included a brief note about the Netflix streaming series “Ozark” in a morning “warm-up.” I wrote,
“Call me an old ethics fogey, but I don’t think these kinds of TV series are culturally healthy. I’ve been watching the Netflix series “Ozark,” and hating myself for it. The show is well acted and even has its ethics dilemmas, but like “Breaking Bad,” which was obviously its inspiration, there are no admirable characters, and the “heroes” are criminals. In the Golden Age of TV, there were unwritten (and sometimes written) rules that shows could not rationalize, trivialize or romanticize illegal, immoral or unethical behavior, and needed to reaffirm positive values. In “Ozark,” “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul,” the latter’s spin-off, as well as “House of Cards,” and “Shameless,” among others, there are virtually no admirable characters at all. I have been watching “Ozark” in part because I like the actors, in part because there’s nothing I want to watch anywhere else except baseball, and, yes, in part because of voyeurism. Still, it makes me want to take a shower, and I felt that the increasing tendency of Hollywood to portray everything and everyone as corrupt makes a “the ends justify the means” rationalization seem like a matter of survival.”
Well, that was a shallow and unfair analysis, I am now compelled to say. Living alone with non-work time being a constant challenge between baseball seasons and disappointed by so many other series, I have returned to some old ones that I recalled as at least consistently excellent in scripting and performances, including consensus classics like “The Sopranos,” “Six Feet Under,” “Ray Donovan” and the best of them all, “Lonesome Dove.”
My reaction to “Ozark” the second time through has been completely different from the first time. For one thing, there is so much of it I don’t remember that I have to believe that I didn’t give the show my complete attention on the first viewing. Secondly, I realize now that “Ozark” is an ethics series as much as “The Walking Dead” is an ethics series, and for a similar reason. A normal family is thrust by a confluence of events beyond its control into a set of extreme circumstances beyond their experience and comprehension. They find themselves in a true Bizarro World ethical environment where what is considered ethical in a normal culture will not work, requiring the acceptance of new values and the mastering of new skills, with the alternative being death.
